Rollback

Publisher's Summary

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer writes imaginative SF novels that have earned him an enthusiastic following. Set in the near future, Rollback is "a novel to be savored by science fiction and mainstream readers alike" (Globe and Mail).Thirty-eight years ago, Dr. Sarah Halifax earned worldwide fame by deciphering a radio transmission from an unknown intelligence reaching out from deep space. Now 87, Sarah receives news that, at long last, a new signal has been received, and her services are desperately needed once again.But Sarah needs to stay alive long enough to decode the message. With the aid of corporate backers, she and her husband undertake an incredibly costly medical process called a Rollback, in which decades may be added to their lives - but only if it's successful.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful

He's Been Better- Characters Good

I liked where the story was going, the characters and the plot...and then he rushed the ending. What I really was interested in was only a few pages in the prologue rather than what I expected to be the thrust of the novel.

I haven't been up to doing any reviews for awhile, but this one warrants some comment. I know it's name "Rollback", and the medical process that refers to accounts for 85% of the story. The 'rollback" is an super-expensive, complicated treatment to reverse the aging process back to 25 years old. I'm not giving away anything by explaining that the reason the "rollback" drives the story is because there's a really intriguiing subplot about alien contact from far away and - because of the elapsed time between messages and replies - they decide they need to keep one of the five main characters alive long enough to be able to continue deciphering and replying. The really great story line (well, up to the disappointing ending) comes from the alien contact narrative and the intriguiing and insightful conversations driven by the wife, who works for SETI and is a delightful character. The husband is a turd who, once regressed, can't keep it in his pants and cheats on his wife. Excruciating and unbelievably boring chapters are wasted as we are, basically, intended to believe that, well, of course anyone "rolled back" from 84 to 25 just couldn't help but need sex really, really bad and about how much he has fallen for another 25 year old girl at the university where the wife was once a household name. I think you can see where this is going. The fourth main character is the moneybags who pays for the procedures, a rather Trump-like and unappealing person. And the fifth is "Gunter", an absolutely delightful robot bought by moneybags to care for the wife. The conversations about alien life, intentions, evolution and such are the only thing that kept me listening. From those insights I feel like I learned some things - the rest was just awful.